Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.
Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
One day posterity will remember these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage.
Here we have some people who call themselves Christians and they forget Jesus Christ was a Jew. Something like anti-Semitism is an artificial way of avoiding responsibility. You blame the problems in your country on someone else, on some group.
No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicles of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet.
Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.
Life is a rainbow which also includes black.
I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.
Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!
Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.
True sport is always a duel, a duel with nature, with one’s own fear, with one’s own fatigue, a duel in which the body and the mind are strengthened.
Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.
He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.
But the system for all its cruelty and deceitfulness, turned out to be stupid. It had taught its future gravedigger how to wield a shovel.
Life is a rainbow which also includes black,” from “Guardian,” 1987.